All about me
I went last night to see Julie and Julia, the new movie out about Julia Childs and a young woman name Julie who blogs about cooking out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Meryl Streep plays Julia Childs – and as usual she does a fabulous job, at times I almost forgot it was Streep and thought it was Childs. And let me just say I love(d) Julia Childs. Before I went a few people told me that the part of about Childs was great and the part about the blogger not so great.
I agree. Here is a woman who cooks her way through Mastering in 365 days and blogs about it. She then receives copious calls from huge publishing firms to write a book about it, then she gets the opportunity to make a movie about it. Well, I can say this about that – really? All riding on the coattails of Julia Childs’ phenomenal success as a personality and chef.
For many years as I wrote fiction, my friends would implore me to write autobiography because as one put it, “Your family is Southern Gothic at its best.” But I wouldn’t do it. Then in 2001 my mother went to the hospital for a minor injury that turned into the fiasco we are witnessing now and I started keeping a journal on my family specifically. In 2004, I started writing in earnest about New Orleans, my family, and my life.
When I started my blog nearly five years ago, I didn’t know that I would be writing more than Gothic, I’d have tragedy, romance, homosexuality, sense of place and not to mention a lot of fun at the core of my writing. Forget about family, they were a backdrop to my own drama. Someone once said that if you are not writing autobiography then you are plagiarizing. Well I have offered up cross country moves, major devastation in the form of Katrina and Rita, affair, divorce, dating in the late 40s, switching teams, not to mention my relationship with my mother. Has anyone called me for a movie deal – ah, no.